Hana's POTG
by TheRealKLT
Summary: leads a mission in the South China Sea.


Every so often they'd hit a pocket of air and the arcade would rumble.

Hana sat on a couch in the concession area, near the Nano Cola machine. Around her, the classic gaming terminals lining the walls were lit neon, pinks and purples, and blues. The machines all beeped and chimed and blooped as the rest of her unit worked their controls, gunched by the ghosts, or bricks, or barrels. Hana would've joined them, more than likely destroying _GamEra_ 's embarrassing Asteroids high score, but she was otherwise preoccupied. A thin visor of light covered her face, emitting from her headset. Contained in that light, a man who was twice her age waring designer jeans half his size grinned with perfectly white teeth. Hana could almost smell his cologne; she imagined he soaked in it. "Tell us, Hana, what's next? You must have goals."

Hana shrugged. "I'm just having fun," she said, and popped a gum bubble between her teeth. There were goals, sure-even immediate ones. Kill a sea monster and stay alive, but that wasn't what you were expected to say on live TV. You were expected to play coy and charm them effortlessly. "I'll probably AFK for a quick snack and then break a world record, I'm playing it by ear, Tae."

The studio audience laughed in her headset receiver. Tae glanced at them, smiling along. He shifted in his seat, re-crossed his legs. "No, but really, Hana. May I call you Hana?" Hana gave another shrug. "You're a girl-pardon me..." Tae chuckles. "A young woman who's accomplished so much in such a short time. Professional gamer at just 16 years old, undefeated StarCraft champion by 19, and now you're even taking Hollywood by storm. That's a lot to achieve in such a short period of time, especially if you're doing so all by yourself. So, tell us, what is there left for you to do?"

Hana heard the question, but as if it were far away, tinny. Her eyes glossed.

 _"Hana,"_ she heard a voice from a memory. _She was playing against the computer. Father said that she wasn't ready for online competition yet, because she was only 9. In this game, Hana was Terran, the computer was playing the enemy Protoss. Hana had turtled the choke points on her map, but all of her vespene resources were running low. Her remaining siege tanks were swarmed behind the marine bunkers, the Protoss Carriers loosing hundreds of interceptors. Hana's SCVs struggled to repair everything, but their hit points were dropping just as fast. Father nudged her. "What is there left to do?"_

 _"I don't know!" Little Hana's lip wobbled. No matter how many times she tried, she couldn't win. If she sieged her chokes, there were carriers. If she built a fleet of battleships, there were templars. If she sent a platoon of goliaths, there were too many pylons. It felt useless. "I give up!" she said, and shoved the keyboard away. Tears of shame welled in her eyes, but when she glanced up at him, Father was smiling at her. She saw her own miserable expression reflected in his glasses._

 _"Hana, what do we do when we feel overwhelmed?" he asked._

 _She sniffed. "We attack the source of the trouble."_

 _"That's right," he said. He pushed the keyboard back toward her, then took her hand and rested it back on the mouse. With her fingers, he highlighted the last of her siege tanks with a drag of the left click, right-clicked their toggle, and told them all to attack one carrier at a time. In just a few moments, her choke point was clear again, and her SCVs began to repair her defenses. "You see?" Father said, releasing her hand again. "One problem at a time."_

"Hana..." Tae repeated her name, and she twitched. Her eyes refocused on the holographic feed in front of her. The audience chuckled at her obvious distraction. "I asked you what was next."

Hana popped another bubble. "Gosh, this is so boring," she said. "I'm falling asleep listening to you, Tae-Kwon. How do your other guests stand it?" This elicited raucous laughter from the invisible audience, and a thin smile from Tae himself. On Hana's side of the feed, inside the arcade, the APPROACHING DROP ZONE sign suddenly went red. "Oops, that's our time, Tae-Tae. Gotta go. TTYL."

"Well, Ms. Song, on behalf of everyone at OGN, I'd like to thank you for-"

She killed the feed.

Hana hopped up and reached for the ceiling on her tippy toes, stretching her limbs lazily. Her teammates were participating in similar routines. _GamEra_ had fell forward onto his hands and started push-ups. _KittenMi10enz_ was running in place. _[Bl0ck]H3ad_ was sitting cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed. The other six rubbed their lucky rabbit's foot, or stuck a fresh wad of gum under their heel, or clapped their cheeks with open palms. They all had their thing; you didn't get into the top 10 without gaining a few eccentricities. "We ready to win, gang?"

"I guess I'm about as ready as I'll ever be," _RaZZle-DaZZle_ said. He cracked his neck and fingers in a succession of icky pops of his joints, which never failed to make Hana cringe.

"Victory is never assured." _[Bl0ck]H3ad_ opened her eyes. "Only death is inevitable."

"That's the spirit!" Hana took a few steps toward the back half of the arcade, where there were no gaming booths, and the walls angled downward into a shadowy point. The APPROACHING DROP ZONE sign overhead was flashing. That always meant there wasn't much time left. "Alright, let's get all lined up, you adorable noobs." The others grumbled their retorts, but they did as she said. The ten of them didn't have military ranks, but that didn't mean they weren't ranked, after all. "Here we go..." The darkness cracked white. "Brace yourselves."

It was a thin line at first, but the gap quickly widened, its bleak gray overpowering the muted neon of the arcade consoles behind them. The loading ramp continued to open, its hydraulic motors whining beneath the howl of the wind and the roaring turbine engines on either side of the transport carrier. Hana's hair whipped free of its bindings, flowing behind her head.

MacaBRUH was standing closest to her on the lowered ramp. He shouted over the noise, "I'd literally rather be doing anything else than this!" There was more to what he was saying. A joke, maybe. Hana vaguely heard anxious chuckling from the others. Her attention had wandered away again, watching the clouds swirl in the sky. Somewhere, in the distance…

 _A thunderclap. Rain pattered on their home's tin roof. Hana heard her father's voice, louder than even the hurricane. He was yelling. "Then why her?!" Hana crept toward her bedroom door, sheet metal on a hinge, gently pushing until it cracked open without so much of a creak. She pressed her eye to the slit and peered into the kitchen. There were two strangers there with her father, dressed in pressed uniforms and neat berets. "Of all people, why my daughter?"_

 _"You know exactly why, Hyung," one of the strangers said._

 _The other stranger expanded on their answer anyway: "We need pilots," she said. "Their problem-solving, quick thinking, their reflexes... Your daughter has those attributes in spades. Not to mention she's top of her class, testing well above-average for her age group. I watched her beat_ FangFlex _on television. Her victory was inspired." There was a pause, only a few moments, but it was enough to be telling. "Yes, we know who she is, Mr. Song. You can't hide a talent like that one for very long. It's time for her to do her nation proud."_

 _"Take me instead," Father said, clutching the first man's lapels. "Leave her, take me."_

 _The man brushed her father's hands away. "We're not here for you, Hyung."_

 _Hana gasped in the doorway, and all three of them turned to gaze on her standing there, eye twitching. Having been discovered, she widened the gap. "Hana," her father said, placing his hand on her shoulder. She was almost his height, now. "Hana, these soldiers are from the—"_

 _"Ms. Song, we're from_ ROKA _," the woman said. "You've been drafted to serve."_

 _Hana blinked. It didn't make any sense; she was no soldier. "Father?"_

 _"Hana," her father said, "_ _what do we do when we feel overwhelmed?"_

 _"We attack the source of the trouble," Hana recited, stiffening._

 _"That's right." Father's hand squeezed. "No hesitation."_

Something thundered, but not from the sky. It came from below them; a sound so deep it shuddered up Hana's spine and snapped her out of her reverie. The wind on the loading ramp was bitter. It bit her skin through the thin pilot's jumpsuit she wore, but Hana could barely feel it. Feelings were a luxury a winner couldn't afford. Hana spit her chewing gum into the vacuum. "Okay, team, lock it up," she said, louder than the shrieking throughout the cargo bay—a declaration of intent. "Let's get down there and pull some agro."

They took a running start down the ramp and leapt into the gray, one after another. Hana felt gravity snatch her in midair and start to drag her down by her center. They spread their limbs, flattening out their bodies against the drag. For a short while, time itself paused, and their descent seemed to halt. It was as if Hana and the others had become suspended in the clouds, which were rising up instead, enveloping them in cool foam. That was until they broke the stratosphere, and they caught sight of the topography. There was only the distant coast of Jeiu, and the East China Sea rushing up at them. "Time to pull the rip cord," Hana mouthed at _Wr3ckLass_ , who was to her immediate right. _Wr3ckLass_ nodded and passed on the message.

There was a bracelet on Hana's left wrist, protected beneath her glove. On it, a purple button pulsed. She pressed it, then, as the ocean rippled darkly beneath her. The call response was instantaneous—a beam from above, a shimmer of violet and sapphire, and then the MECHA manifested whole. Hana slipped beneath its gull-wing hatch. Her hands found the joysticks inside, guiding her body into position as the hatch closed, and the interior console lights came on in flickers and flashes. " online," she said, coolly. The corner of her screen blinked, LIVE.

Her thrusters kicked on just as the mass of the MECHA reached the water, its belly gliding across the surface, spraying foam. 's teammates were suited up, too, in the airspace behind her. Not exactly in formation; they spiraled and spun, whooping inside their cockpits. When they rounded the coast of Jeiu, the playfulness stopped. A terrible silhouette loomed in the ocean mist, stepping through its veil, parting it. More spider than amphibian, its long, segmented legs breathed steam from their joints. An open grate on the spine of its scaled exoskeleton vented even more hot saltwater, waste from its self-perpetuated hydroelectric motor. The monster clawed itself up the terrain, crushing the island's southernmost port beneath it. From the nearby mainland, artillery barrages exploded uselessly against its hull. "Let's show it some love," said, thumbing her joystick triggers.

The MECHAs streaked the monster with their fusion cannons, crisscrossing like ribbons on a gift box. It reared back and screamed, not from a mouth but rather from a wincing of motivators, a whirring of its recalibration. A leg came down over her, and wheeled around its width, threading through the monster's underbelly and lighting it up with cannon fire again. It reared up, its secondary tagma curling like a scorpion's tail. It took aim with its stringer, a sharpened barrel, and raked the sky with a red laser. The MECHAs took evasive maneuvers, whirling like tops in the sky, but the heat from the plasma overpowered their coolant systems, and threatened them with system shutdowns.

 _GamEra_ 's voice came over the party comm. "Since when does it do that!?"

"Our current strategy is disastrously ineffective," _[Bl0ck]H3ad_ said.

 _MacaBRUH_ said, "Did we get nerfed and no one told me?"

scoffed into her microphone. "C'mon, what is this, easy mode!?" She yanked back hard on the joysticks and gunned her thrusters, narrowly beating another strafe of the laser. It melted down a skyscraper instead, halving it and liquefying the steel infrastructure. rode the inertia from her thrusters back into the clouds. On her dasboard, the power meter was deep in the danger zone, her altimeter was flashing warnings at her, and yet her ratings hit counter was in the triple digits and rising, chiming with every new viewer. curved back around toward the ocean, ignoring the alarms blaring inside the MECHA. "I'm ready to initiate self-destruct sequence!"

Her teammates were swarming the monster, darting around it and barrel-rolling away from its laser. On its spine, the main vent was blasting exhaust in regular torrents. aimed her MECHA's nose down at it, counting the seconds between each blast. 1... 2... 3... Another, 1... 2... 3... Three seconds was all she needed. flipped off the safety housing over the emergency button, and quickly slammed her palm down on it. "NERF THIS," she said, as the MECHA around her began to glow. Yanking down on the eject pulley, the MECHA's gull-wings opened and rocketed her out.

Hana was falling, and so was her MECHA. It sailed downward, curving slightly. Its sleek armored form had become an disco ball of iridescent light, pulsing tunelessly. It hit the lip of the vent just as the steam subsided. It bounced, hitting the opposite lip, bounced again, and then plopped right down into it. Hana watched the light bleeding between the monsters scales as her MECHA ping-ponged inside of it, but then she crashed into the icy water. Beneath the waves, she heard the kaboom.

Moments later, they dragged her up onto the beach. Hana's headset was still recording, the dialog box still reading, LIVE. She looked up and saw the exploding tarantula, all of its scrap metal viscera shredding free of its exoskeleton in plumes of fire and smoke. Hana attempted to wink and finger-gun at it, but she coughed up a lungful of saltwater instead. "Game Over," she said, sputtering.

The ratings on her livestream had broken records. A new high score.


End file.
